Stunned town wanders in state of shock

April Rabkin, Chronicle Foreign Service

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, May 25, 2008

Editor's note: April Rabkin is a Chronicle Foreign Service reporter living in Beijing. In this essay, she recounts her experiences when she visited the earthquake zone in Sichuan province from May 16-20.

The county seat of Beichuan was nestled in a steep green valley that made it especially beautiful and especially vulnerable. Two weeks ago more than 13,000 people lived there, according to state news sources, but only about a third escaped the May 12 earthquake alive.

Last weekend, the town was swarming. Soldiers marched in and out single file; rescue teams in orange biohazard suits picked apart the rubble; amateur photographers in fatigues poised, waiting for corpses to be pulled out. Full body bags lay around ignored. Two blackened legs poked out from under a building, like the wicked Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz. A sweet, pungent smell lingered in the air, and almost everyone wore a surgical mask.

Journalists were busy collecting poignant antidotes: a dog circling above his owners trapped in the rubble and a cell phone ringing through concrete and snarled rebar, likely a call from a searching family member. A man asked if I wanted to check out his sister's corpse hanging in a building, visible but low priority to the rescue operation. Then he told a man behind me, "It's just that I don't have any cash."

A macabre scene

Suddenly a mob of people started running toward me. And then running past me. Some people said an aftershock was on its way; others said a reservoir above us was breaking open. Soldiers with walkie-talkies yelled at us to go faster. The only reason we didn't add to the death toll is that a stampede can't go too fast uphill. I trotted for a while alongside an elderly man who was gripping a bottle of water with no more than a sip left. He must have been skeptical about the impending flood.

Miles away, a mogul from the prosperous east coast province of Jiangsu was apparently not so skeptical. Wearing fatigues with a fake Red Cross armband in a car with a military license plate, he passed out his name card, before pulling out a hand-held stop sign and directing traffic, telling every driver headed into the valley that he had already seen the water coming over the hill. Maybe he just wanted to be a hero.

It turned out that the evacuation was just an official precaution. The government would rather be safe than sorry, since it was already taking blame for a death toll that could reach 80,000. Schools were some of the first buildings to collapse in many towns, and there is a widespread belief that earthquakes can be forecast.

But another reason is cultural: China has long conflated natural and man-made disasters. Natural disasters have been a sign that past dynasties had lost its "Mandate of Heaven" and were about to lose power, according to Mencius, a prominent Confucian philosopher.

Such sentiment didn't begin as mere superstition or coincidence. Emperors' responsibility for flood control dates back more than 4,000 years. Legend has it that Yu the Great, the founder of the Xia dynasty (2194-2149 B.C.), was awarded the throne for building effective canals after horrendous floods had ravaged the Yellow River valley. When later more corrupt dynasties slacked off on flood control, dynasties weakened along with the nation's dams.

On the other hand, famine caused by Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s - 30 million people starved to death because of Mao Zedong's delusions about transforming China from primarily an agrarian economy into an industrial society - still goes down in Chinese history books as a natural disaster. Not surprising, some Chinese consider the May 12 earthquake as a man-made disaster, and blame the government for failing to forecast it even though such technology does not exist.

Perhaps that's why two days after the Beichuan flood warnings, the nightly news forecast a seven-point-something aftershock for that night. Almost everyone on my hotel floor evacuated, with Chinese journalists and nongovernmental organization workers stopping by my room to warn me.

We carried our bedding to a park across the street, where people huddled together and stayed up late talking and playing cards. What if there was no aftershock? People said they would still sleep out again the next night. Eventually I went back to my hotel bed, but walked outside the next morning to see the same people waiting for the aftershock.

Two brothers

Out of four days that I spent in Sichuan province, this is what I remember most: two brothers, named Steel and Soldier Shang, climbing up and out of a valley, saddled with baskets of blankets, peanut oil and a rice cooker still in its box.

Soldier, the older one, carried a two-foot-tall gold frame wedding portrait of his uncle and aunt. The contrast of her white veil, his black suit and the blue magnolia wallpaper behind them were subdued by dust and doom. They had just left their uncle buried behind in the ruins. They said a quick prayer and took what they could carry.

When the brothers stopped to rest on a boulder in the middle of a road, a TV reporter questioned Soldier until he choked up and stopped talking. They kept walking. Along the way, they passed buildings crumpled like soda cans, families circled around eating lunch amid the debris, and incense sticks smoking next to the shadow of a corpse. An 88-year-old man sat alone staring out of a makeshift hut in the rubble. He used to sell instant noodles and soda out of a shop there. He said he was staying put.

Everything is gone

It is the elderly who seem most stunned and heartbroken, who linger searching through the rubble the longest, who may have the hardest time starting over.

Driving back the next night to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, we nearly run over an elderly woman zigzagging across a freshly paved highway. It is completely dark except for our headlights and rounds of wheat chafe burning in the fields like funeral pyres. Spring harvest has not stopped for the earthquake. When we pick her up, she talks nonstop but mostly incomprehensibly except for a few lines my Sichuanese friend can gather: Everything is gone; her children died in Beichuan.

The earthquake shook her out of the mountains into a land that has changed so fast around her that she doesn't understand the highway and its new rules: Here she is considered a pedestrian, and pedestrians do not walk for miles along the shoulder with cars zooming past.